ROMANCE OF FLYING.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 25, 6 March 1914, Page 6

ROMANCE OF FLYING.

GROWTH OF THE 'PLANE.

A HISTORY OF PROGRESS. [Specially written for Tins Hun,] Man is by nature un envious and «15hcontented creature, and lie Imh never Item satisfied to live in the way Nature intended him to live. Long, long ages ago, into the featherweight brain of the primitive man crept the desire for some better dwelling than was afforded him by the caves in the hillside and the leafy tops of the trees, and he began to collect material for the first humpy, th«r prime parent of the Waldorf-Astoria and the Sumner bungalow. Primitive man envied the ability of the whale and the humble sardine to make long journeys across the watei', antl with mud-daubed twigs and skins he made hint a coracle, direct progenitor of the mighty Imperator. The cave-dweller was hefty and fleet of foot, but there were animals which could run Tings round him. As time" went on and the chief food of man was what he could hunt down and kill, he was faced with

the necessity of moving faster or reverting to apehood. Necessity is the mother of invention, as the poet sings, and he coralled a few horses and trained them sufficiently to be able to ride on their backs. Next he discovered the principle of the wheel, and the man who took out the wife and kiddies in the first chariot

—consisting of a pine board and two solid discs —was hailed as the champion crank of his time. One can imagine how the old baldheads nodded solemnly one to the other and averred that the device wa<? of the. devil—for I suppose that gentleman had been invented by then —and that the intrepid pioneer would be better employed at setting a springe to catch woodcocks than wasting

his time and substance on freakish ideas of locomotion. But to-day we have the motor car and the pony cartr—both of which are direct descendants of the childish chariot of thousands of years ago-

Putting it Over the Birds. "What has all this got to do with aviation 1' '' I hear you ask. "A, great deal,'' say I, for the same envy and instinct for imitation of the '' lotver" ani•malswwats t flii;ectly responsible for the amazing air perfoi'mances of Pegoud and Hucks and fieachey to-day. It hurt man to think that the lord of creation—" the only reasoning animal" —should have it put all over him by the birds, and for centuries he has b6en thinking how he could get even with the' wearers of feathers. To-day he has his revenge —in illustration of which bold assertion I shall tell a story.

A few weeks ago Lincoln Beachey was giving an exhibition of upside-down flying at San Francisco, to the stupendous amazement of several thousand rubbernecked Californians. Said one news,paper man in the, .crowd to another- —and you will please understand that in America pressmen do not speak so grammatically as they do in Christchurcb — "Gee! But ain't he like a bird! " -

"Nix to the birds,'' was the indignant response. '' Beachey puts it all oyer the birds. Did you ever see a duck flying on its back?" A Century Ago. v .

Which brings us back to oar mutton — the history of the art of airmanship. I suppose most people will be surprised to know that a very excellent and workable aeroplane wks built in England over a* century ago. In while all the world was dreaming of;the conquest of the air —and mostly,, conquering it by , writing Jules Verne-H. G. Wells-Rudyard Kipling kind of stories iabout it—an Englishman, Sir George Cayley, worked out plans for an aeroplane. Of ■, course, he had -mo practical experiments to rely on, but nevertheless he managed to evolve a machine which embodied all the salient features of the monoplane of 1914, in which men fly hundreds of miles on a stretch, thousands of feet above the earth —and upside-down if it suits their purpose. Cayley was a Very accomplished engineer, and he produced a machine which we now know would have flown hacl he been able to get. an engine producing enough power to drive his plane through the air without being so heavy as to be unliftable. He thought the steam engine might be fitted to do the work, but it never was, and until -the pdvent of the petrol motor, one of the greatest inventions of all time, man could rise only in the unwieldy balloon, which plaeed him at the mercy of etery whid.that blew. THe Real Conquerors.

A hundred years after Cayley came the great Wright brothers, to whom will be everlasting fame as, the real conquerors of the air. The Wrights—Orville and Wilbur—read every word that : Cayley ever wrote on the subject, iand, having a petrol motor of a sort ready to their hands, they made thp first machine which actually flew —the grandfather of the biplane which permits Lincoln Beachey to put it all over the birds. But before the Wrights there werfl many other workers who made most valuable experiments- with gliders —practically aeroplanes without engines—and their experiments and observations were of the most distinct value when the motor did happen along and make human flight possible. There is not space here to tell of all of them, but I must mention Heiison and Stringfellow, who in 1842 built a model embodying all the ideas of what an aeroplane should be. That model now rests in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and it is as like a modern Antoinette monoplane, which Hubert Latham used to fly so finely before he got in the track of a wild buffalo, as need be. Lilienthal the Great.'

And in 1871 came the German, Otto Lilienthal —one of the great names in the history of the science of aircraft. After studying bird . flight and having made a great many experiments with kites of various shapes, Lilienthal constructed a glider with which he used to make fine flights from the top of a hill. He worked on the very soundest lines, and his discoveries were invaluable. He worked with enthusiasm for many years, and amassed a fund of knowledge which places the whole world in his eternal) debt —but inJLB96 disaster overtook him. A stray puffJJi wind upset his frail machine, and Lilienthal was dashed to his death —the first of the long list of vie-; tims wbich Naturs lias claimed as the price of man's temerity in daring to at-

tempt to put it over the birds. Of course, there is the age-old story of Icarus, but I for one don't believe in Icarus. The imagination of the Greeks is something I can't get over. *

Early Aoroplanes. Sir Hi mm Maxim, and Ader, and the Australian pioneer Margrave I shall have to pass over and get back again to tjie Wrightß. They were working away tjuioUy i" America, while Louis Bleriot — liioriof, of that magnificent first crossChamiol flight which we all remember — and Captain I'Vilinr, later to be killed in an aeroplane umaKh —and Pilchr.r, who hlho paid for bin experience with liis life ~- were experimenting with gliders on the other side of the Atlantic. Eventually, on December 17, HUM, the "Wrights, having lit,ted a motor to their machine, made the first power-driven flights. Although the aeroplane as we now know it —in a primitive form, of course —was now an accomplished fact, the old world still went serenely on in its year-long journey round the sun, and nobody even dreamt of the tremendous revelation which was shortly due. The Wrights worked in secret, and years passed before they burst on the slumbering public with the greatest announcement of the trhimph of human skill which has been made in our time. Paragraphs containing some hint of their work appeared from time to time in American newspapers, but the brothers were not communicative, and they did the Brer Rabbit act—they "laid low and said nitffin" — until they were ready. The Annua Mirabilis—l9oß.

The whole story cannot now be told, so I must hurry on to 1908, the really great year in the history of aviation. In that year Wilbur Wright crossed to France with his machine, and gave many exhibition flights. Meanwhile, in France, Santos Dumont, the rich young Brazilian,, had had a biplane built and fitted with a 50 horse-power engine, in which he made a "flight" of eighty yards, only to sec his '' record-'' broken a, little iater by Delagrange. In 1908, also, the first bad aeroplane accident occurred, for Orville Wright had a smash in America and killed his passenger, Lieutenant Self ridge, of the* United, Statts Army. Delarange also was one of the earliest victims. One. of his wings crumpled up during a flight, and he was hurled earthwards to immediate death. Learning from Accidents.

The early aviators knew the risks tlicy took, and from every accident they drew a lesson. Undaunted by the increasing number of smashes, they carried on, learning all the time. Prom Delagrange's fate they learned that strength of construction and reliability of materials were essential, and their aeroplanes became stronger ami stronger' all the-time, until to-day we have those wonderful machines* built of steel which, to tise a homely figure, you couldn't smash with a sledge hammer. A Period of Bomance.

The six years which have elapsed since the first jfreat public flight have been full of romance, but to tell one half of the fine stories that are to be told would fill a whole volume. It is a pity that some of them .cannot be recounted here. One would like to tell of Glen Curtiss, the intrepid young American who has been in the. game from the start, and who" is now telling the world of his plans for a trans-At-lantic flight; of Cleavez, the Peruvian, who first flew the Alps, only to meet death through a simple accident at the end of his hazardous journey; of the brothers Johnstone —Ralph and Delacroix —whose deaths in rapid succession broke the great heart of a mother; of Jules Yedrines, winner of many great races, and the, hero of the Paris to Cairo flight; of Claude Graham-White, greatest of England's bird-men, and the darling of the ladies j of two continents; of Lieutenant Corneau, the French naval oflßeer, who as "M. Beaumont," won the-great London to Manchester and circuit'of "Great Britain races; of Louis. Bleriot, the cross-channel hero and prince of aviation school masters; of John B. Moisant. the dare-devil; American,,who flew from Paris to London with a passenger while making only his Srourth or "fifth ascent; of Harry Hawker, the Australian, who just failed to travel right" round Great Britain in his hydro-aeroplane,, and who is now startling the, good people of Sydney with his skill and daring; 1 of poor V Charlie'' Bolls, £cion of a noble house, who first crossed the Channel from England to France; and returned without landing; of Colonel Cody, greatest of British military airmen, who built and flew a giant way .biplane; of the Farmans, and Voisin, and Paulhan, Boe, Lefevre, Tiseandier, and the Comte de Lambert, and dozens of others whose names "come to the mind when - one thinks of the glorious days of the pioneers. - A Glimpse of,the Future.

We have been privileged, to llVe in a great age, and we have seen wonders performed in the realms-ofscience< which far transcend anything ever- conjured up by the imaginations of those old Greeks. Jules Verne has been out done in actual fact, and the fancy of Wells is not nearly so'grotesque as-we were wont to think it not so many years ago. As this story is teing written men are flying from Paris to Bome. from Vienna to Berlin, from Chicago to New York, from London'to The Hague, and their doings are recorded a& every day happenings. An ascent to 10,000 ft above the earth does not move tors to headings half so long or so black as those which told the story of SantosDumont's hop of 240 ft a. short eight years ago. . W,e have arrived fin; the age of the .aeroplane, and the years yet to cbriie will be full of great happenings in the air. The flying machine is as yet in its veriest infancy, and as time goes on it will improve in strength and reliability and speed—it is already the greatest machine ever evolved from the brain of man—and it will-grow in size and lifting-power, until the day will come—as it will surely -come in our generation —when the aeroplane will be one of our commercial machines, and one of the deadliest weapons in the ■ naval and military armaments of all the great nations. GEO. F. HENDBY.